Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms

Prof. Rik Belew
University of California-San Diego (visiting U. Wisconsin-Madison)
rik@cs.ucsd.edu, belew@cs.wisc.edu

12:05 pm Wed. Sep. 27 in 5134 Chamberlin Hall

Even the simplest creature is marvelous to observe as it transforms itself to better match the environment in which it finds itself. How is such adaptation accomplished? How much of this capability should be attributed to the particular individual we happen to be observing, how much to its species, and how much to the inclusive evolutionary processes wedding all life to this planet? How did the elaborate individual learning process we find in complex organisms evolve? Once in place, how does an increased individual capacity for adaptation alter the selective pressures causing the species to adapt to its niche?

This talk will give an overview of a book (of the same title) edited by R. K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell, to be published soon by Addison-Wesley. The book grew out of a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute which brought together a group of about 20 scientists from biology, psychology, and computer science, all studying interactions between the evolution of populations and individuals' adaptations in those populations, and all of whom made some use of computational tools in their work. A good example is the ``Baldwin effect,'' a phenomena identified by the psychologist J. Mark Baldwin almost exactly a century ago, that arises repeatedly in many modern computer simulations. This talk will touch on the rich historical heritatge of such phenomena, ranging from biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to psychologists like Piaget and Skinner, as well as the new insights offered by computer simulations and new algorithms inspired by the same insights.